Recently some members of the video-game community were enraged by news that FromSoftware's oblique open-world adventure Elden Ring has been nominated in the best narrative category at the forthcoming Game Awards. Like the developer's other titles (the Dark Souls series and Bloodborne, for instance), this complex game tells its story through short snippets of dialogue rather than long cinematic cutscenes, and via objects in the world, rather than endless scrolls, audio messages or emails. The player has to do most of the work in assembling a cogent narrative, which suited me fine, because, through the 200-hours I've spent with the game, I simply do not care about the plot – I have my own. I wander the dangerous lands of Caelid and Dragonbarrow as an existential assassin, like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter or Mad Max, not bothering to try and make sense of the world, just keen to explore and fight and survive. I like this story better – especially when my son joins me and we take on foes together, revelling in the story that builds of is own accord as we play.

Welcome back to Pushing Buttons – this is Keza, back with you after a period of convalescence. As I was lying in bed with Covid, watching what felt like 4,000 trailers from the live-streamed summer video-game showcases, I struggled to tell the difference between a lot of them. Every shooter seemed to be set in space. Every wholesome indie seemed to feature frogs or bears. Admittedly I was quite ill, but also, as our games correspondent Keith Stuart explored in last week's newsletter, we've reached a point where a lot of mainstream culture, including games, is starting to feel as if it's folding in on itself.

Over the last decade, the concept of "games as a service" has revolutionised the way the interactive entertainment industry works. From the subscriptions introduced by massively multiplayer online adventures such as World of Warcraft to the seasonal battle passes of current online shooters, we're seeing a huge amount of focus on games that can sustain a lucrative community of players over several years. But where does that leave more offbeat ideas and concepts that couldn't support years' worth of play? Where does it leave the single-player narrative adventure – the blockbusting genre that brought us titles such as Metal Gear Solid, Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect? It's a genre Sony has supported through funding the studios that make games such as The Last of Us, Spider-Man and God of War.

The chaotic mini-game series is making a really welcome return, this time featuring two-player co-op. The new vignette challenges range from avoiding bird plops to tweaking someone's nipple hair. The first 2D adventure for Samus in a long time, and a game that's been on Nintendo's to-do list for 15 years. Set after the events of Metroid Fusion, the game pits you against invulnerable EMMI robots that can only be beaten with stealth and strategy and new tech including the Phantom Cloak, which offers timed invisibility. Nintendo showed a luscious new trailer for its big sequel, revealing how Link will now be able to explore floating sky islands as well as a larger version of the Hyrule landscape.

Ten years ago, there was a revolution in the way video games told stories. Games such as Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed and Yakuza began to combine freely explorable open-world environments with story missions and side quests, allowing players to drop in and out of the main plotlines as they wished – or abandon them altogether. The experience of playing narrative video games changed forever. So where can we expect narrative games to go next? At the Celsius 232 festival, we sat down with five experienced narrative designers: Witcher 3 writer Jakub Szamałek, comic book and games writers Dan and Nik Abnett, Bungie narrative designer Margaret Stohl and Tom Jubert, writer of Faster Than Light and The Talos Principle.

Simply put, he thinks viewers respond more to actual characters rather than archaic game-engine updates. Saatchi recruited designers from some of his favorite interactive games, including people who've worked on the character Elizabeth in Bioshock Infinite, Ellie in The Last of Us and the canceled but infamously ambitious Steven Spielberg project LMNO. He also brought on Doug Church as a consultant, a designer who worked on LMNO and is well known for developing groundbreaking games like System Shock. "From the very beginning, I think what set us apart in the studio was that the people leading it all loved video games and narrative games," Saatchi said. "I think a lot of VR studios out there often were led by people who didn't [love games]. I've been playing narrative games since I was five ... When we founded Story Studio, it was the intersection of immersive theater, narrative games and cinema.... I haven't had as many friends who have a good sense of immersive games, like Gone Home, Tacoma and Virginia."